California Book Club host John Freeman started the evening by reading an email from reader Joyce Okazaki, who wrote in to tell author Naomi Hirahara that in 1944, she’d gone as a child from Manzanar to Chicago and lived at the corner of Clark and Division Streets in the second-story room above a bar. Freeman noted that Hirahara was writing a historical mystery with Clark and Division, but she was also writing a collective experience that happened to so many people. He asked her, “How is it different when you’re writing something when [you know that] someone’s going to write back to you possibly and say, ‘Hey, that happened to me’? Or is that something you’ve found is happening with every one of your books?”
Hirahara said that it’s happened with other books she’s written, too, but more so with Clark and Division. She did want to spotlight the experience of Japanese Americans in Chicago. When she worked at the Rafu Shimpo, which is the largest Japanese American daily newspaper, she had a lot of elders who she knew had lived there. It wasn’t until she cowrote Life After Manzanar that she realized that Chicago “was the number-one destination [where Japanese Americans were relocated after their incarceration in Manzanar], and there’s some significance about that.” During her research for that book, she noticed that there were these “incidents on the edges,” like the existence of two gangs who fought, and as a crime writer, she became curious about those and wanted to do a “deeper dive.”
Freeman asked Hirahara to speak about finding the lacunae in the archives, those things that were happening at the fringes of the known material. Referring to Nisei women’s life stories, he asked, “Did you find in your experience as a reporter that there were certain silences that you could almost rehear when you encountered them in the archive?” Hirahara said that she is “Nisei and a half” and that she’s a little bit of an outsider to the incarceration experience because while her extended family had been incarcerated, her parents were in Hiroshima and her mother was an immigrant. “Sometimes being an outsider, although people view us as insiders, I think it allows us a certain kind of perspective that maybe others would not be aware of,” she said. While at Rafu Shimpo, she would try to feature women on the front pages, but inevitably, aside from politicians or leaders, when she would try to feature everyday women, she would get a call from a featured woman asking her not to run the story. “There was a big cost to their social network if they spoke out of turn,” Hirahara said.
Special guest Kristen Hayashi, the director of collections management and access and curator at the Japanese American National Museum, joined the conversation. During the event, she was in the museum sitting in front of a section of the barracks from the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. She praised Hirahara’s book as vital because the post-camp period is “an important moment in history that isn’t sufficiently covered.”
Hayashi commented that the War Relocation Authority (WRA) had wanted former incarcerees to move to cities like Chicago, a place that, as Hirahara paints it, wasn’t as magical as the WRA said it would be. She asked Hirahara to talk more about the “invisible bars that continued to cage people in” after camp. Hirahara explained that she’d rewritten the book during the pandemic, and it made the experience of the main character, Aki Ito, “even more palpable.” “That must have been crazy, right? To be in one of the 10 camps, and then you go to Chicago…[which] was so big and filled with all these factories,” she said. She noted that the WRA was informing the incarcerees, “Don’t be part of the Japanese American community…. Blend in and disappear.” She added, “But, of course, you’re in a strange town and the government has done this to you. You’re not going to necessarily trust the government. You’re going to trust other Japanese Americans.”
Hayashi brought up the model-minority myth, noting that a lot of survivors of incarceration will say, “Internment was this terrible moment, and then we were successful.” She pointed out that the word successful comes up a lot. In the book, Aki’s sister, Rose, “outwardly is the epitome of the model minority” in the beginning, though in Chicago, there are rumors of abortion and suicide. Hirahara responded, “That’s the beauty of crime fiction. Because you’re dealing with criminals, everyone is a suspect, and everyone has a different motive.” She said that shame is a big cultural issue, and that some, especially Issei, felt shame about being incarcerated — because they thought, “We had to have done something wrong because why were we in camp” — and pressure to show that they were good Americans. There were individuals who committed crimes, but the community wanted to sweep that fact under the rug.
Hirahara said, “What I love doing is showing the humanity of us. We’re not superheroes. We’re not this Japanese American action figure. ‘We’re able to deal with anything that’s thrown to us.’ No, we’re human and things happen.”•
Join us on September 21 at 5 p.m., when Kelly Lytle Hernández will appear in conversation with a special guest and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Mexicans. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
